Moves to Windows open scheduler searches
September 3, 2014
Some HP 3000 sites are migrating from HP 3000s to Windows .NET systems and architecture. While there's one great advantage in development environment during such a transition -- nothing could be easier to hire than experts in Visual Studio, nee Visual Basic -- companies will have to find a scheduler, one with job handling powers of MPE/iX. Native Windows won't begin to match the 3000's strengths.
More than three years ago, MB Foster built a scheduler for Windows sites, and customers are sizing up this MBF Scheduler. There's even been interest from IT shops where a HP 3000 has never booted up. They are ofter users of the JDA Direct Commerce (formerly Ecometry-Escalate Retail) software on Windows servers. These companies never seen an MPE colon prompt, but some need that level of functionality to manage its jobs.
"If senior management has simply decided that Windows was the place to be," said CEO Birket Foster, "we could help automate the business processes -- by managing batch jobs in the regular day and month-end close, as well as handling Ecometry jobs and SQL Server jobs." Automating jobs makes a Windows IT shop manager more productive, like creating another set of hands to help team members. And for a 3000 shop making a transition, something like an independent job handler means they'll be able to stay on schedule with the expected level of productivity.
Job listings, also known as standard lists (STDLISTs), are common to both the 3000 and Windows environment, and the software was built to provide the best of both 3000 and Windows worlds, Foster said. The software's got its own STDLIST reviewer, one that's integrated with a scripting language called MBF-UDAX. Ecometry sites working on HP 3000s usually rely on a tool as advanced as Robelle's Suprtool for job scheduling.
Foster's Scheduler includes filtering buttons in job reports by user, by job name, by status and by subqueue. A recent addition to the product introduced a custom category that managers can use to select or sort jobs. While running thousands of batch jobs a day, some are in distinct categories. Customers like the idea of managing factory floor jobs separately from finance jobs, for example. Managers
Measurement Specialties, the manufacturer which runs a dozen HP 3000s in sites across North America, China and Europe, uses the MBF Scheduler. The product manages a complementary farm of MBF Scheduler Windows servers to move jobs among servers throughout Measurement Systems' 3000s.
Terry Simpkins at Measurement Specialties has been devoted to Infor's MANMAN implementations well beyond the vendor's ability to support the application. Like other customers around the community, Simpkins and his team have compared the Scheduler to MPE's mature tools, and favorably. Sites like this don't need a separate Unix or Linux server for job scheduling, which is the usual way to keep Windows IT on schedule.
Windows schedulers serve HP 3000s, but also serve the Windows-only IT environments where some MPE/iX operations will be headed. At Measurement Specialities, for example, the IT pro who handles scheduling never sees the HP 3000. But enterprise server-born concepts such as job fences are tools which are at that IT pro's command.